The October release of Afro-Americana Imprints, 1535-1922: From the Library Company of Philadelphia includes a piece of travel literature describing America and its peculiar institution, a pamphlet bemoaning the ills of Reconstruction, and speeches and writings on the political aspects of slavery by abolitionist and senator Charles Sumner.

A Tour in the United States of America (1784)

By John Ferdinand Smyth Stuart, Esq.

John Ferdinand Smyth Stuart (1745-1814) studied medicine at Edinburgh University, emigrated to America, and began his practice in Virginia. When the American Revolution began, Stuart, a loyalist, abandoned his home and served in the British Army. During the war he was captured and held prisoner, spending eighteen months in irons. Misfortune followed Stuart. After returning to England after the war, his pension for service was suspended. Moving to the West Indies, he was shipwrecked three times. Returning one more time to England, he learned his pension claims were too old to be heard. In 1814 he was knocked down and killed by a carriage.

Writing of his sojourn in America, Stuart recounts the country’s natural beauty but the charm of his prose is diminished quickly when he writes:

In 1967 author and journalist Eugene Lyons published an article in the WashingtonEvening Star under the headline, “Freedom Came to Russians on this Day 50 Years Ago.” A bit of math would place that momentous event in 1917; surely he’s referring to the “Great October” revolution?

No, his dateline is March 12, and the revolution he’s commemorating is the one that actually resulted in the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II and the collapse of the Romanov dynasty. By Lyons’ reckoning, the true Russian revolution occurred in February (following the Russian Orthodox Julian calendar, which would place it in March according to the Gregorian calendar used in the West).

In his article, Lyons took severe issue with the Soviet mythology surrounding the October (Bolshevik) revolution that literally wiped out the most liberal government Russia had ever known, writing:

The successful grab for power by Lenin, Trotsky, and their small following was a deed plotted in secrecy, a private cabal, with the masses so much raw stuff to be terrorized and processed.

Curated from the Library Company of Philadelphia’s acclaimed African American history archive, African Americans and Jim Crow: Repression and Protest, 1883-1922, is a newly released digital collection of searchable books, pamphlets and speeches. Its coverage begins with an 1883 decision known as the “The Civil Rights Cases” in which the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated the Civil Rights Act of 1875, declaring the federal government could not prevent discrimination on the basis of race.

This ruling paved the way for the codification of Jim Crow laws that reversed the hard-earned gains African Americans had made during Reconstruction. Public education, transportation, and accommodations were only a few of the areas of daily life in the U.S. in which segregation was legally allowed.

Using this new collection’s “Suggested Searches” feature, students and other researchers can easily explore revealing primary source materials that provide stark reminders of the fierce sense of separation that permeated American society during this divisive era.

It’s tempting to emphasize the geopolitical hazards of the Cold War at the expense of the sciences; after all, ICBMs will kill scientists and laymen alike, and their deployment is overtly political. The technical achievements of science can be seen simply as inert, rarefied means to political ends.

As we’ll see in this month’s highlights from Joint Publications Research Service (JPRS) Reports, 1957-1995, scientific research and development can be dramatic and dangerous in its own right. We’ll consider Soviet research into plague and anthrax, automated weapons, manned space exploration, and hypoxia as a limiting factor in mountain climbing. Note that all of these topics have military relevance.

Most of this topical report focuses on the epidemiology of various forms of plague, with tangential investigations of anthrax, cholera and brucellosis. Ostensibly this research was undertaken by the USSR Ministry of Health, but it’s hardly a stretch to see the utility of such work both for and in defense against biological weapons.

Consider for a moment the plight of Indonesia’s leaders in 1945: how to establish a national identity in a country spread across more than 13,000 islands, featuring hundreds of languages and ethnic groups, all in a precarious balance between the military, Muslims, and communists?

During Indonesia’s struggle to break free from over 300 years of Dutch colonial rule, and then from Japanese military occupation following World War II, early attempts to govern through parliamentary democracy became synonymous with corruption and bureaucratic paralysis. Between 1950 and 1959 there were seven attempts to build coalition governments, the last culminating in a period of martial law. Clearly a new approach was needed.

That approach came to be known as “Guided Democracy” (Demokrasi Terpimpin). Sukarno, Indonesia’s first president and the leader of the 1945 revolution that finally established Indonesia as a sovereign state, exercised an increasingly prominent role in the nation’s politics until his downfall in 1967. His administration’s managed or “Guided” democracy became more than an empty slogan or a euphemism for one-man rule; we shall see that there was indeed a unique Indonesian variant of the socialist experiment.

“Write what you know,” goes the dictum. Thus from Russian author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn we have among many other works the following:

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich—forced labor camps

First Circle (i.e., of Hell)—forced labor camps for scientists

Cancer Ward—malady as social metaphor

August 1914—blunders in warfare

Gulag Archipelago—the definitive guide to Soviet forced labor camps.

With such a pronounced critical voice, we can surmise that Solzhenitsyn’s writing was unlikely to win him lasting friends in the Soviet government. Before his first major work, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962), could be published, none other than Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev needed to give his permission. The timing was right; Khrushchev was still intent on denouncing the excesses of Stalinism, and Solzhenitsyn’s writing gained his favor in that political climate. But the thaw didn’t last.

When Khrushchev was deposed in 1964, Solzhenitsyn experienced a similar downturn in his fate. By 1970 when he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, he didn’t dare leave the country and so had to wait until he was sent into exile in the West in 1974 before he could actually collect the prize.

Just in time for the new school year, we’re taking a look at education in the former Soviet Union during the 1960s. We have two volumes of curriculum material for a correspondence course on Marxism-Leninism, an in-depth examination of the Soviet education system, and for extra credit, a serious study on sleep learning.

Want to broaden your world view but too busy to take that graduate seminar on socialism? Then this two-volume correspondence course, “The Modern International Communist Worker and National-Liberation Movement” was made for you.

Before discounting this material in light of the collapse of the Soviet Union, bear in mind that there is value to be had in a socialist critique of capitalism despite that particular outcome. Utopian projects are not unknown in the West, and millions of Russians were not delusional in their adherence to socialism. They were rather courageous, and endured a great deal of political trial and error at a tremendous personal cost.

Workers in the West have benefited greatly from the labor movement in such matters as the eight-hour workday and laws prohibiting child labor. Just as learning a second language will improve one’s native language skills, an understanding of socialism will make the reader a better citizen in a democracy.

Much of the content of these volumes is historical rather than theoretical, so it’s a relatively easy read. The first volume covers socialism in the Soviet Union from 1917-1939, while the second volume covers 1939-1963 from a more international perspective.